The Goldhirsh Foundation announced winners for its annual My LA2050 Grants Challenge Tuesday, a $1 million grant competition to source creative ideas about shaping the future of Los Angeles. The 12 winning organizations will receive grants ranging from $25,000 to
$100,000 to implement projects in 2017 designed around themes that make Los Angeles the best place to learn, create, play, connect, and live.

Industrial landlords near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are beginning to upgrade their facilities to meet the increasingly heavy demands of e-commerce. In Compton, PGIM Real Estate just completed a four-month, multimillion renovation on its Dominguez Hills Industrial Center, which sits on nearly 5 1/2 acres. The biggest transformation to the 34-year-old property was scraping away 10,000 square feet of offices to expand the truck yard - crucial to attract logistics companies.

Los Angeles could be sending another local player to join Donald Trump’s nascent presidential administration. NBC News and the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Trump was considering Debra Wong Yang, a partner at downtown’s Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, to chair of the Security and Exchange Commission.

A former cardboard recycling yard in downtown’s Arts District sold last week for more than double the price it fetched just two years ago, a sign of quickly rising land values in a fast-developing market. Vancouver-based Onni Group purchased the 38,266-square-foot site in an off-market deal on November 11 for just over $10 million, according to a source familiar with the deal. In 2014, Core Development picked up the plot for just $3.9 million, according to public records.

Solace Capital Partners announced the closing of its first fund, a $576 million investment vehicle, Monday. The West Los Angeles private equity outfit, which was formed in 2014, has already put $120 million into five different companies, according to a statement. The firm focuses on control investing in distressed assets and over leveraged companies in the middle and lower market.

Cadiz Inc., the Los Angeles company that’s trying to build a water storage and conveyance project in the Mojave Desert, announced Tuesday that it has closed a public offering that netted $10.6 million in working capital. Separately, the company announced a refinancing of $43 million in senior debt that extends the maturity date two years until September 2019.

Domain registry company XYZ Inc. has been granted permission by the Chinese government to sell its dot-xyz domain suffix in China, potentially opening up a huge market to the Santa Monica startup. XYZ has sold more than 6 million dot-xyz domains globally. About 2 million of those domains were registered in China with tentative permission from the Chinese government. The firm has exclusive rights from Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, a Marina del Rey nonprofit that administers and manages domain names, to sell the dot-xyz domain.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation has ranked 11 companies in Los Angeles a perfect 100 for their LGBTQ-inclusive workplace policies in the latest 2017 Corporate Equality Index (CEI). Some Los Angeles companies which earned the “Best Places to Work for LGBT Equality” included American Apparel, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., and Mattel Inc. The civil rights organization, which aims to improve the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals, ranked 887 national companies in this year’s CEI, 123 of which are headquartered in California. Of those, 70 California companies earned perfect scores of 100.

Construction is booming in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California. Downtown towers are sprouting up left and right, a new $1.5 billion bridge spanning the mouth of the Los Angeles River at the Port of Long Beach is taking shape, and a $2.6 billion football stadium for the Los Angeles Rams broke ground last month in Inglewood. But a new report by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., “Building the Future: Construction in Southern California,” says the region still hasn’t fully recovered from the recession and that the construction industry faces a challenging regulatory environment and high costs.

After ruling last month that Santa Monica developer Neil Shekhter forged documents in a dispute over a joint property venture, a judge Friday ordered the real estate mogul to cede all control of the projects to AEW Capital Management. The nine properties at issue in the dispute include Luxe apartment developments in West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Culver City. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Suzane Bruguera also handed AEW’s attorneys at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher more than $6 million in attorneys’ fees and costs.

Los Angeles hospitality firm SBE Entertainment Group completed a $82 million acquisition of Morgans Hotel Group, the New York City company behind iconic hotel brands such as the Delano in Miami Beach and West Hollywood’s Mondrian, SBE announced on Dec. 1. SBE, which owns the SLS hotel chain that includes hotels in Beverly Hills and Las Vegas, will now have 22 hotels internationally and be worth around $805 million. The deal was originally announced in May.